I feel so twisted up inside myself. How could I have failed to suspect her? I’d thought through the possibilities of it being a thousand people, but most of them had been strangers.
Harriet Watson had left Evie alone in the classroom that night, neglecting her for a length of time that was long enough for my daughter to be abducted. At least, that was what I’d believed, and it was what everyone else had believed, too. Most theories – and everyone was an expert – had run along similar lines.
All alone, Evie must have wandered outside, looking for me, and been whisked away into oblivion by an Eastern European trafficking gang, or a paedophile living nearby.
I haven’t emerged from the tragedy as an innocent party, not by a long shot.
I am the ‘uncaring bitch’ who arrived late to school.
I am the ‘drugged-up excuse for a mother’ who relied on sedatives to get through her crippling grief.
I am the ‘inadequate failure’ of a woman who must not be trusted or believed under any circumstances.
But it seems so obvious, now.
Since Evie had gone, Harriet Watson has attempted to contact me many times. The police warned her off at first. For a couple of weeks she was actually a suspect in Evie’s abduction. But in the end, the police were satisfied that she was merely negligent. Everyone agreed she should never have left a five-year-old child unattended in a classroom, no matter how late a parent was to collect her.
Mr Bryce, the school caretaker, gave evidence stating that when he checked the classroom doors, Rowan Class was unlocked, including the French doors leading directly out into the unsecured grounds.
To all intents and purposes, it looked like my Evie had just walked outside looking for me and was picked up by an opportunist.
The struggling school budget did not support a CCTV system and a local football match had ensured that most people living nearby were away from the surrounding homes, supporting their local team.
The local media – which quickly gravitated to national media, and then back again, when the big newspapers lost interest – condemned Harriet Watson and specifically St Saviour’s School.
But they saved their real vitriol for me. The single mother who’d been unacceptably late that day.
After the ‘Find Evie’ publicity had started to die down, surprisingly quickly, Harriet Watson began writing me letters. Crazy, rambling, handwritten letters where she would start by condemning my parenting skills, or lack of them, and then graduate, over a few pages, to offering me her friendship and her self-proclaimed counselling skills.
In one letter, she told me she had already begun to counsel Evie on the loss of her father, encouraging her to discuss her feelings in the group. This was apparently going to ‘prepare her for her future’ and ‘help her grow a thick skin for when she moved up to the local comprehensive school’.
By this time, Watson had been sacked from her job by the school governors, but through DI Manvers I expressed my utmost concern at the regular and widely accepted practice of teaching assistants working with isolated groups of children.
Of course, most teaching assistants are not like Harriet Watson, but still, the opportunity was afforded to her and she gladly took it.
After I received that letter I vomited for a full day. I couldn’t eat for a week. I hated myself, loathed myself. I wanted to die. I couldn’t stop thinking about all those times Evie had told me how she hated school, how Miss Watson made her talk in the group when she didn’t want to. She had felt uncomfortable and came to the person she trusted most in the world. Me. And I doubted her, swept her concerns aside.
Mum’s gut feelings about Harriet Watson had been right all along.
I ignored all Harriet’s letters from that point forward. I read them, I couldn’t help myself, but I never replied and eventually they came less frequently and finally they stopped altogether.
‘She’s harmless enough but mad as a box of frogs.’ This had been DI Manver’s expert but unofficial opinion. ‘And after meeting her mother, I’d say I know exactly where she gets it from.’
But she wasn’t harmless.
She hurt Evie, knocked her confidence. Humiliated her in front of her peers, forced her to speak about the most personal things, such as her daddy’s death. St Saviour’s gave her the opportunity and power to wield over very young children who were not equipped to fight back. And for that reason, I can never forgive the school.
I hated Harriet Watson for what she did. She let Evie down.
But I’d seen a counsellor for eighteen months after Evie’s abduction and she helped me see that I was accountable too. I learned how to forgive myself and to forgive Harriet Watson, too.
But I was na?ve. New evidence has now come to light that someone else was involved and I am completely convinced it was Harriet Watson. It could only be her.
My rage and hatred has been born anew.
I am certain that, between them, Harriet Watson and Joanne Deacon know what happened to Evie.
I just don’t know how or why they did it, yet.
I decided from the outset that I would not be involving DI Manvers in any of my planned actions. He and his team have already let Harriet Watson off the hook and have obviously completely failed to properly investigate Joanne Deacon.
I wait until it’s dark outside. I dress in jeans and a charcoal-grey duffle coat with hat, scarf and gloves. I pull the hat down low over my forehead and leave the house. I turn back to the window to see Mum peering out, her face etched with concern.
It’s going to kill her, what happened to Evie. If we can’t find her, she will just continue to get frailer and then she’ll just let go of life. We have never discussed what happened; it’s odd. You don’t always know how you’re going to react to a sudden tragedy breaking your life into little pieces.
Me and Mum will discuss whether to have egg or beans on toast for tea, or occasionally what is happening in politics, but we never talk about Evie and whether she is alive or dead. It’s how we get through the horror of each long, drawn-out day.
I tell Mum, ‘I need a walk to clear my head.’
But when I leave the house, I can tell she doesn’t believe a word of it.
It has been a lonely three years but that’s the way I wanted it. I couldn’t handle people. After Evie disappeared, both Dale and Bryony sent cards and letters, and Dale had turned up with flowers on more than one occasion, but I had Mum send him away. I just couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t see him.
The only person I kept in touch with, and who has been a true support to me, is Tara. We never get together or meet up, we just chat on the phone. Tara, for all her own problems – her MS has grown steadily worse over the years – understands my need to withdraw and be alone. She has retreated herself since Rob died and because of her illness.
Apparently, Joanne Deacon was so upset by what happened that she immediately resigned from Gregory’s and moved out of the area. And now she is lying in a hospital bed, just a shell, a husk. We have no way of accessing further information about what she did with Evie or why she did it.
But Harriet Watson knows. I just feel it.
It takes me half an hour to walk to a bus stop far enough away that I feel a little more anonymous. Frost covers the pavement like a dusting of shimmering icing sugar. Evie used to love it when it was like this. She’d wake up and look out of her bedroom curtains, declaring, ‘Mummy, Jack Frost has been!’
For a few blissful seconds I can almost imagine she’s with me right now. The warmth of her little hand in mine, the constant chatter and curiosity for the world around her.
My eyes prickle and the feeling quickly crumbles, leaving behind only icy fingers of grief that claw at my heart.
I’ve always felt . . . known . . . that Evie is still alive.
But what have they done with her?